‘Feral’ COVID babies are entering kindergarten. How scared should schools be?

Kourtney Marsh’s first son, Jayce, was born in January 2020. Then the world shut down.

As if there weren’t enough to worry about as a first-time mom, the first year of Marsh’s son’s life was also the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with lockdowns, mask mandates and more. When COVID case numbers would fall in their hometown of Atlanta, Marsh would enroll Jayce in day care, hoping to give him some semblance of normal socialization. But then infection rates would shoot up again, day care facilities would close down and Jayce would be back home with her. Marsh worried that her son would be shy or struggle socially because he’d had so little interaction with other kids amid the pandemic. But by the time he turned 3, restrictions were lifted and Jayce was able to spend some time in an early preschool. “It was like this is what he’s been waiting for,” Marsh tells Yahoo. “He’s an extrovert, he loves to run wild, and I’m noticing that’s a commonality between all the COVID babies.”

Other parents of COVID babies, born in 2020, have noticed “wild” tendencies too. Some have gone as far as calling their kids — their own kids! — feral. Others describe them as bossy or fearlessly independent. One viral meme depicted the incoming kindergarten class as a gaggle of ghastly characters: Pennywise, Jason, Freddy Kreuger, the Scream. Marsh herself re-shared the post on TikTok. “I think it’s gonna be a rough year for kindergarten teachers,” says Marsh, a former kindergarten teacher herself. “These kids are more than just talkative or extroverted — they have all this energy bouncing around.” Jayce’s first day of kindergarten was Aug. 4, 2025. “He was like, ‘I’m gonna be fine, Mom,’ and he hopped out of that car and he did not look back,” says Marsh. “All these kids just live with no regrets.”

As these COVID babies enter a structured classroom for the first time, some parents are warning teachers to brace themselves — but are their kids really so different? Here’s what we learned.

The concern for COVID babies

There were a few potential concerns. Masks and lockdowns might mean that babies born in the first year of the pandemic wouldn’t see as many people and full faces, hampering their psychological development and ability to learn social cues. Plus, mothers’ pandemic-related stress during pregnancy could affect the developing fetus, and infection with the novel coronavirus could potentially harm the baby in the womb. Dr. Sarah Mulkey, a prenatal and neonatal neurologist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., researches both closely. “For the most part, we’re seeing that some studies show mild developmental delays … and some studies showing there’s really no difference between these kids and other kids,” Mulkey tells Yahoo.

Babies born at the height of the pandemic seem to have dodged the worst possible outcomes, but that doesn’t mean there were no effects. Mulkey estimates that some 20% of the children born to mothers who had COVID during pregnancy showed some degree of developmental delays in their fine motor or language skills by ages 2 or 3. “We may expect that they would be a little more shy, have a little more difficulty making friends at first and may not be as strong in their communication skills as other children,” she adds. But overall, the effects seem to be pretty mild.

As for their potential to be little terrors in the kindergarten classroom? “The short answer is that, while that’s really funny, there’s not really a lot of scientific basis for [the notion that] there’s a generation of feral children headed to kindergarten,” Sara Johnson, a professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, tells Yahoo. Like Mulkey, Johnson has been following children born during the pandemic and has been relieved to find only some mild developmental delays. “This generation, in some way, has had the longest time from when they were exposed to the pandemic to self-right or get back on track,” she explains. Babies born in 2020 have had relatively normal toddler years. That might actually give them an advantage compared with older kids who were pulled from classrooms and had to adjust to Zoom school, then return to pre-pandemic life. With those children, experts have seen “more challenges with behavior and social and emotional regulation,” Johnson says.

Wild, bossy extroverts: What’s behind an unexpected personality trend?

As Johnson said, there hasn’t been a large study of today’s 5-year-olds to establish that they are indeed more independent and outgoing; it’s just something that families have observed in their own kids and discussed on social media.

Still, “I don’t doubt the parents’ observations,” Johnson says. It’s just hard to pinpoint the why and get rid of other variables. Parents who could work from home during the pandemic may just have had more time to closely watch their kids. It could also have to do with birth order. “But there could be something to it,” says Johnson. “It could be that all the time at home with caregivers and siblings might enrich their vocabulary” and lead to more confidence and extroversion, she adds. “It would be great if parents were right, and this is a generation of kids that are just ready to get it done — I would love that.”

That’s what Marsh thinks, and she has her own theories about why — and what problems still lie ahead for the incoming class of kindergartners and their teachers. Her son doesn’t remember his first years at home with his mother, but she does. For the first two years of Jayce’s life, Marsh was working from home, like so many other parents. If she was busy and he was whining for something, she often had to just give in to preserve her focus. “You take all these parents just trying to survive and just putting a Band-Aid over whatever the problem there is, and then you put all that in a classroom — you got trouble on your hands,” Marsh says. She suspects that her son and other kids his age “just live with no regrets” in part because they’ve been “sheltered, because parents will give more grace than teachers will.”

Marsh isn’t worried about her son making friends at school. She says Jayce is more than ready to break out of his COVID bubble and was already deemed an “extrovert” by his pre-kindergarten teacher (and that doesn’t seem to be simply a product of growing up in the Marsh family; Jayce’s 2-year-old sister is shy). Marsh is just mildly concerned about Jayce’s willingness to sit still, listen and share. “He’s a little territorial,” Marsh says. At home, she’s been reading Jayce books like The Rainbow Fish to teach him about kindness and sharing and recommends other parents worried their COVID kids are too used to ruling the roost to do the same. “When it comes to sharing and things like that that you would learn in a public classroom setting, I feel like our COVID babies lack that,” she says. “So I’m about to go ahead and clear off his kindergarten teacher’s wish list so I can get on her good side,” Marsh jokes.

As for Jayce, he was raring to go to kindergarten even before his first day. “He was really excited, not nervous at all, just bubbly and ready to go to school,” Marsh says. At his kindergarten’s open house, Jayce told his mother, “You can leave me here and come back tomorrow,” she says. “He’s just ready to explore.”